Employment Rights Bill amendments

The Employment Rights Bill has been through a public bill committee as a result of which some further amendments have been proposed. This committee stage involved hearing evidence from a number of sources including the CBI, the Federation for Small Businesses, Chambers of Commerce, CIPD, other representative organisations and trade unions.

Key amendments to the Bill at this stage are:

• to increase the time limit for making claims to an Employment Tribunal from 3 months to 6 months. This was something that was mentioned during the General Election campaign, but did not appear in the first version of the Bill
• a number of amendments to the already complex provisions around zero hours contracts and rights to guaranteed hours
• introducing a power for the Secretary of State to cap compensation for unfair dismissal during the “Initial Employment Period”

The last of these three amendments is one of the options that had been anticipated when the Government indicated that there would be an Initial Employment Period (akin to a probationary period) during which there would not be full unfair dismissal rights. The amendment suggests that this lower level of protection may now come in the form of a lower cap on unfair dismissal compensation. There is no detail as to what the cap might be.

The Government has not yet published its responses to the various consultations that it launched shortly after the bill was published. During the committee stage, the Government suggested that it is still considering a number of issues and impacts , so it is therefore possible that further changes will be proposed to the Bill.

We also still do not have a clear timeline on the likely implementation dates of the reforms, so there is some way to go before we have certainty about the timing and the final detail of all of the changes in the Employment Rights Bill.